I just downloaded ovftool and installed it on our vCenter server (VirtualCenter 2.5) . I'm trying to convert a VMX to OVF and when I run the tool it tries to open the VMX source and then just returns to the command prompt. No error, no warning, no output at all.

I've tried adding the source type and the target type switches, I've tried just probe mode (not sure if that will work on a VMX machine), I've tried moving the VM files from the network to local machine and tried moving them to another drive on the local machine. Nothing happens at all.

The VM is a Symantec Brightmail Appliance downloaded from Symantec's site. The source VMDK is a 2 GB Max Extent Sparse disk.

Is there a verbose switch to ovftool that I can actually see what it's doing or log the verbosity to a file somewhere? Is the VMX file jacked up? Am I missing something REALLY obvious?

Thanks for the pointer. I downloaded the Monowall appliance and it converted fine.

I opened the VMX file for the Symantec appliance in Notepad and it was formatted with UNIX style CRLF as was the .VMDK description file. I copied the contents of those files to new files in Notepad and renamed all files in the VM folder with shorter names and now the ovftool is converting the VM.

Thanks again for the help.

As a recommendation for enhancement to VMware, maybe the Windows version of the ovftool could check for proper CRLF in the VMX and VMDK description files and convert them to the proper Windows format before attempting a conversion. Thanks for VMware for the tool.